Revolution

HAVANA -- It's early evening on the Malecon, Havana's beautiful seaside boulevard. The young miniskirted girls are out in the moist pink-blue air, tugging at the male tourists, flirting, offering to spend the night with men old enough to be their grandfathers in exchange for a six-pack of Coke, entry to a discotheque and $6.Lisa, a pretty, 13-year-old bleached blond, personifies this city's return to the decadence that Fidel Castro's revolution was supposed...

Cuban Revolution has come to Baltimore's Middle East neighborhood. Just a few blocks away from the Johns Hopkins Hospital , the Middle East area has seldom officered any reason for outsiders to wander in. That is changing. The neighborhood is being developed as a mixed-use life science campus. The anchor tenant is the Science & Technology Park at Johns Hopkins, but the 80-acre area will include other research facilities along with new housing, parking and a six-acre central park.

Kudos to Dan Rodricks for his column ( "For tea party, a question: What now?" Aug 4). What aren't we getting? What exactly does the tea party want us peons (never has the term proved more apt!) to understand? Are they really out to promote a class-based society, fast-reverting to Dickensian proportions? We're jobless and homeless, nest eggs (those lucky enough to have them) vanishing; food and gas prices soar while wallets flatten. Vanishing too is the middle class, and we're back to the bad old days of the obscenely rich getting obscenely richer and the once-hopeful working class back down to the pits.

A Cuban Revolution has come to East Baltimore. The city's Middle East neighborhood is just a few blocks away from Johns Hopkins Hospital, but there was seldom any reason for outsiders to wander in. That has changed. Amid protests from some longtime residents and others, most homeowners in the area were relocated and their houses — along with many that were abandoned and dilapidated — were torn down. Now Middle East is being developed as a mixed-use life science campus. The anchor tenant is the Science & Technology Park at Johns Hopkins, but the 80-acre area will include other research facilities along with new housing, parking and a six-acre central park.

WASHINGTON - The Iranian theocracy stands on the precipice as it faces its most formidable crisis since the revolution that toppled the shah 25 years ago today. Obscured by the candidate disqualifications, resignations and boycotts in the run-up to Iran's Feb. 20 parliamentary elections is the emergence of a new reform movement made up of a younger generation of parliamentarians, dissident clerics and students. Instead of President Mohammad Khatami's patient negotiations with the right, the new generation of reformers adopted a two-pronged strategy of disengagement from the Islamic Republic's formal institutions and active confrontation with its would-be enforcers on the street.

Pub Date: 1/02/99

When Charles Rees two years ago injected his healthy dose of skepticism into the proceedings of the body that oversees recreational facilities in Columbia, it was thought that he was ushering in an era of revolution. Now, one must wonder if that revolution has been lost, like any non-Columbian trying to navigate his way around the planned city.Mr. Rees is resigning from the council, along with its president, Evelyn Richardson. Meanwhile, candidates who might have played a Rees-like contrarian role in Columbia affairs lost in this weekend's elections.

PHILADELPHIA -- Back in 1968 when police were battling demonstrators on the streets of Chicago, I didn't give a hoot.I had just come back from seven months in Prague, and the only thing that mattered to me were the Soviet tanks rumbling through Czechoslovakia. One of their first objectives was to blast Radio Prague (where I had been working), whose broadcasts promoted the kind of democratic reforms that horrified Moscow.I kept flicking TV channels in my newspaper's city room in a frenzied effort to get past bloody Chicago street scenes and find some Prague news.

WASHINGTON -- Two months after the popular uprising that forced dictator Slobodan Milosevic out of power in Serbia, a mood of uncertainty prevails. Posters put up by the student group Otpor (Resistance) capture the unease. Underneath a picture of a giant bulldozer, symbol of the revolution, is a warning to new Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica and his entourage: "We are still watching." Will these new leaders, is the message's subtext, prove corrupt like the Milosevic regime? Or incompetent?

They fought it in Chestertown. They fought it in Ellicott City. They fought it in Owings Mills.Those locales won't conjure images of Bunker Hill and Yorktown, but their battles against Wal-Mart are very much part of a revolution. The late Sam Walton, founder of the Arkansas-based chain, was for years noted as the country's wealthiest man. Yet for many Americans, particularly in the populous Northeast, his was an invisible empire.The company made its mark mostly in rural backwaters, where it bled dry the mom-and-pops on Main Street.

I grew up in the 1950s in a sports-deprived area of southeast Georgia. Except for a not-so-close and generally unnoticed Georgia Florida league baseball farm team, there was no major league baseball, football or basketball. Sports meant cow pasture baseball, share the ball, bat and glove and not much of a distraction. The 1960s came with some participation in the voting rights and integration struggles, along with the new arrival of professional baseball, an interesting but not an embedded passion.

Members of the Governor William Paca Chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution – from left, Emily Andrews, Dotty Meyer, Barbara Adams and Ginny Carlin – accept a proclamation from Harford County Executive Mr. David Craig proclaiming Constitution Week in Harford County the week of Sept. 17 to 23. This is the 225th anniversary of the Constitution. In 1955 DAR petitioned Congress to set aside the week of September 17-23 to honor the Constitution and the petition was signed into law by President Eisenhower the next year.

It was a quiet night for a revolution. People at the bar in Joe Squared Station North sat huddled over drinks and conversations. Folks occasionally strolled in to pick up pizza orders or headed to dining tables in the back. Few even glanced at the small group of musicians nestled by the storefront window playing Bach. But those players, members of a national movement called Classical Revolution, soldiered on for several hours, dedicated to the cause of bringing a venerable old art form into unexpected places.

Lance Armstrong won the Revolution 3 Half-Full Triathlon at Centennial Park in Howard County on Sunday, finishing the 70-mile race in just under 4 hours, 11 minutes. The effort by the famous cyclist and embattled seven-time Tour de France winner in the combined swimming, biking and running event, organized by the Ulman Cancer Fund for Young Adults to raise money for cancer awareness, brought him in more than 18 minutes ahead of the second place finisher, Louis Therien of Quebec. Sharon Schmidt-Mongrain of Lafayette Hill, Pa., was the top female finisher in just under 4 hours, 54 minutes.

The snide comments surprised Randy Kurtz, who figured she was suffering the same harrowing rites of passage as her U.S. Naval Academy classmates as they trudged through the plebe summer of 1978. "You don't belong here," the male midshipmen might say. A few seemed to take particular glee in pulling her down as she attempted the Herndon Climb, which culminates plebe year. Kurtz, a Connecticut native, was part of the third academy class to include women, and the spirit of equality had not sunk in with everyone.

Egyptians are expected to learn the results of their first-ever democratic presidential contest Thursday, but what should have been a watershed moment in that nation has instead turned into a sour reminder of how difficult it will be to overcome an authoritarian past. Before voting was completed, the nation's generals staged what amounted to a military coup by announcing they, not the new president, would control the prime minister, parliament, the national budget and matters of war and peace - all without civilian oversight or accountability.

THE OTHER DAY I took my car to the shop for an oil change and routine check-up. A 1983 model, the old girl requires the type of regular attention that only a good mechanic can provide. That's not me.I miss not being able to drive to work when I leave her at the shop. It's not that I don't like to ride the bus -- even with the exorbitant MTA fares. I do, occasionally.But alone in my car I can play my Hendrix tape of ''Manic Depression'' as loudly as I want (''I know what I want/But I just don't know/How to go about getting it'')